This invention relates to safety devices for motor vehicles, and more particularly to a device that is utilized to protect against accidental operation of the vehicle's throttle or fuel injection system.
The prior art utilizes a variety of techniques to prevent the accidental acceleration of motor vehicles when engaging the motor vehicle's drive assembly from a park or neutral position into any forward or reverse gear configuration. Such systems include instructing the operator of the motor vehicle to insure that the vehicle operator maintains pressure on the brake foot pedal during the initial shifting operation from park or neutral into a drive position. Other safety devices include detents of substantial depth to insure that the motor vehicle's gears will not accidentally engage when the gear-operating lever is disposed in a park or neutral position.
However, there exists the phenomenon in certain motor vehicles wherein when the operator intentionally removes the motor vehicle's gear-shift lever from the park or neutral position to the drive or reverse position the vehicle will suddenly accelerate as if by depressing the accelerator foot pedal, despite the operator not providing any application of force to the accelerator pedal. Experience has shown that the vehicle's engine throttle, for an unknown reason, appears to open at the time of the initial shifting of the gears. This difficulty has been conjectured as a function of unwanted hydraulic coupling effects between the various mechanisms of the motor vehicle. Certain automobile manufacturers, however, have claimed that the cause of this sudden acceleration stems from operator carelessness.
The present invention has been developed to overcome any inadvertent application of fuel to the engine of the motor vehicle until such time as the vehicle operator is fully prepared to go forward or backward, and wherein the throttle, at such time, starts at a rest or dwell position and can only be advanced upon the intentional application of force to the accelerator pedal by the operator.